Well Katmai is a brilliant place, well worth visiting, but first here are some badly needed extensions to the common bear safety advice you see in brochures and hear from the park rangers:
Hike in groups: Extension - a bear will charge a group of three people, and perhaps bigger groups. Don’t assume that being with a few people scares the bears away, because it doesn’t.
Make lots of noise when hiking so that the bears will hear you coming and move off the trail: Extension - only the small bears move away, the big ones just keep on coming.
Don’t surprise a bear, get between a sow and her cubs, or run from a bear as these may cause a bear to react instinctively and attack: Extension - bears are also very intelligent and might attack based on a rational, reasoned out plan, such as charging someone who is carrying a fishing rod. Not based on a fishy smell but based on the bear knowing what a fishing rod is and how it is used, and reasoning that someone carrying a fishing rod might have caught a few fish, even if the bear can’t smell any, and so by charging might cause the person to drop the fish. Or maybe the bear just wants to fuck with the person for its own entertainment or because it’s bored, hungry or just pissed off.
So if you follow all the standard guidelines about how to act in bear country, you are not safe, you are still completely at the mercy of the bears and had better pray that the woods are full of ripe juicy berries, the rivers full of fat salmon and that the bears have something better to do than to go after you.

Katmai is a large national park at the base of the Aleutian chain of islands. It’s mostly wilderness with a few fishing lodges and villages scattered throughout. I went to Brooks Camp which is just a few cabins, dining hall, small campground and a ranger station. It’s the place where all those photos of bears standing on a small waterfall with the salmon jumping into the bears mouth are taken. Roughly, Brooks Camp is located on the shore of Lake Brooks and the mouth of the Brooks River. The campground is on the lake shore about a half mile from the mouth of the river.

Nearer the mouth of the river are the cabins, dining hall and ranger station, and at the mouth of the river where it enters the lake there is a footbridge across the river to a viewing platform overlooking the river mouth.

Another half mile up the river is Brooks Falls, the waterfall where the bears congregate to catch the salmon heading upstream over the falls. There is a second viewing platform overlooking the falls. To get from the campground to the first viewing platform you can walk the half mile or so along the beach to the river. There is also a parallel trail in the woods by the beach but you’d be mad to walk that, you can’t see the bears coming.

To get to the second viewing platform you must walk another half mile along a trail through some woods. If there is one place that will make you feel like Little Red Riding Hood it’s that trail to the falls.

There are no roads, or boats for that matter, to Katmai, you have to fly in. I had planned to get a float plane from Homer as I read in a bunch of places that you could get an air taxi from there, and as the crow flies it’s not that far from Homer. However when I was in Homer and asked around no-one would take me. Some said they just do day flights for bear viewing, packed lunch and all that, so fair enough, they’d make more money that way. Others said that they didn’t have an FAA charter to do it, which sounds like bullshit, and a couple of bush pilots said they’d take me for $500 an hour, i.e. $2,500 to drop me there and pick me up a few days later. So I ended up getting a seat on a 16 seater plane from Anchorage to King Salmon, a small fly-in village near Katmai, and then I got a float plane from King Salmon to Brooks Camp, where we landed on the lake by Brooks Lodge. Really cool to finally fly in a float plane; that, along with seeing grizzlies up close and seeing salmon running in the streams were my three big things I wanted to do and I did them all in Katmai.

I camped out there for four nights. Lovely campground on the lake, surrounded by an electric fence to discourage the bears from entering the campground.

Although I found out one morning that one of the gates was broken and had been open for at least one night. The bears used the beach and trail just outside the campground as their highway from the hills down to the river, so you had to be careful when leaving the campground. I really disliked the walk back from the lodge and river to the campground late at night, I was always by myself as I’d be out fishing till 11pm or so and there was never anyone around, and the beach would be full of fresh bear prints and scat.

I’d be able to see any bears on the beach, but not in the trees lining the beach, so it was always a great relief to finally reach the relative safety of the campground and its electric fence.

The salmon arrived at the Brooks River almost to the hour that I did. I thought that the salmon just arrive one at a time, in dribs and drabs and then more and more arrive etc, but apparently one minute there’s no salmon and the next the river is full of them. I heard that they all wait in the ocean for the right time until the water is warm enough or until there is enough of them and then they all head en mass upstream. So I arrived around 4pm on a Thursday. At 2pm there was no fish in the river or so I heard, and at 4pm there was a school of salmon in the water at the footbridge. So once I got my tent set up and some food eaten I found someone to open the office and give me a fishing license. Then at 8pm I headed down to do some salmon fishing. Caught fuck all as by 8:30 the salmon had all disappeared again for the night.

Next day though I headed back down to the footbridge to try to catch my first ever salmon. I’d only bought my cheap fishing rod in Seward two weeks before for a laugh as I read in the paper that the salmon season had opened and so I headed up to the Russian River with my rod. Caught nothing there but a lot of fly fishers lines, here though I could actually see salmon in the river and by then I’d figured out how to use the rod. There was no point going up to the falls to go bear spotting as there were no bears there. No salmon, no bears. The few bears around were hanging around the footbridge area trying their hand at salmon fishing just like me, so I could fish and watch bears at the same time.

There were a fair few bears passing through the area, every now and then I’d have to head up to the viewing platform behind me when a bear would come too close. The viewing platform had a stairs with a waist high gate which really didn’t do anything to keep the bears off the platform, it was more the presence of people on the platform and no good reason for the bears to go up there that kept the bears off the platform. There were a few times when a bear would come sniffing around the gate that I saw how useless it was as a security device. One night I headed up to the platform when a bear came running over and found myself alone up there with the bear running around the base of the stairs. I was pretty nervous, got the hell out of there once the bear moved off a bit.

If you’re fishing by the bridge with the viewing platform behind you, be really careful. You will be lulled into a false sense of security due to all the people on the platform behind you watching for bears. Only they tend to all look at the same bear in one direction and completely fail to see the other bear(s) approaching from another direction. I was fishing at one point and looked over my shoulder as a matter of course only to see a young adult grizzly 20 feet away looking at me. It was only when I was heading quickly for the platform that someone said “look out for that bear”. Yeah, thanks for that warning. Another time I stopped fishing for a minute to walk onto the bridge to see where the salmon were. There was a sow and two cubs on the other side of the bridge that I was aware of, the crowd on the platform were watching them. When I went to walk off the bridge to renew fishing, another sow and two big cubs walked around the corner of the platform, again only 30 or so feet away. I yelled up to the platform “there’s three bears down here” only to be ignored, they thought I was talking about the three they were already looking at. I made a quick and somewhat dodgy decision to leave the bridge and head to the platform but it was a close thing, I was heading towards the bears rather than away, but the bridge has no real security at all, just another small gate. So don’t rely on the crowd of people behind you to spot the bears, they are completely useless, keep looking around you at all times.

Anyways, I hooked a few salmon that day but lost them all, once I had to cut my line as a bear came running over when she saw the fish splashing. There was a sow with two cubs that hung around a lot, she was scary smart. She took a few runs towards me and the odd other fisherman, mostly I was the only one fishing at the footbridge, the other anglers were pros who were doing the catch and release trout fishing upstream.

After a few runs towards me and doing some fishing herself where she usually caught nothing, she retired to the opposite bank of the river down by the lake. I went back to fishing, keeping an eye on her all the time. After wandering around the beach a little she went to the edge of the bank, sat down, and just watched me fish. After a while I hooked another salmon, this time I tried hard to prevent it from splashing, letting the salmon run out, then reel it in a bit, let it run again, etc, trying to tire the fish out. Finally I had the salmon within a few feet of the bank, had my knife with open blade in my hand ready to cut the line if the sow came running again, then started reeling the salmon in. When it was in shallow water the fish started splashing and right away the bear took off running across the river towards me. Man she moved fast. There was no way I was going to let this salmon go, my first ever salmon and it was a fine big one too. And I thought I had enough time to get the fish before the bear reached me. So I reeled it in as quick as I could, pulled it up on shore and cut it in the neck as I’d seen the guys on the Russian River do, turned the salmon over and cut it on the other side. It was bleeding a good bit now and had stopped flapping, and as the bear was getting close I picked up the fish and ran for the viewing platform, only to hear the ranger say “you can’t bring that up here, put it in a fish bag”. So I had to drop the fish, pull out a fish bag, a big plastic bag the rangers give you, and tried to get the fish in the bag while watching the grizzly charge right towards me. The bloody fish started flopping again and I dropped it twice, it was really slippery, finally shoved it in the bag and ran for the platform with the bear right behind me.

Now in fairness you are not supposed to let a bear get a fish from you as they’ll go after other people later and someone will get hurt, so I had to keep the fish and not abandon it. I made it to the stairs, got through the gate and up the stairs with the bear right on my heels. I don’t think the ranger and the other people were too happy to see me, once the grizzly moved off a bit the ranger told me to cross the bridge and get that fish away from there. A couple of days later I met the ranger again and he told me that the people on the platform wanted to cross the bridge back to the lodge as well but said there was no way they were crossing with the guy holding the bleeding fish. They don’t let you clean or cook the fish at Brooks Camp ‘cause of the bears, so they have a freezer that you must put the fish in and take it with you when you leave. That sockeye salmon weighted 8.5 lbs and tasted great.

I caught another sockeye the next day, you are allowed to only keep one a day. The second salmon I reeled in only to be told that a bear had just arrived at the other side of the bridge, this time I stomped on the fishes head, killing it quick with no blood, bagged it and was up on the platform without the bear ever noticing me. I caught the second salmon with the same fly as I’d used to catch the first. It was all I’d left after losing a few other flies the second day. The third day I had another big fighter on the line but another angler got a fish on at the same time which attracted the attention of a bear, who again came running. This time I knew just how fast they can run through water let alone on land, so I cut the line and headed for the platform. A half dozen anglers were sent running this time, the bear got the other anglers fish. The next day there were notices around Brooks Lodge saying that the bears were going after anglers as they weren’t too successful fishing themselves yet, so to pay extra care when fishing. After losing the third fish I moved to another spot by the lake and was chased off by a different bear, then after an hour without any bear sightings I moved back to the foot bridge only to immediately have a bear run out of the trees onto the river towards me. I gave up at that point. Got two nice salmon though, 14lbs in total, tasty red sockeye, my first salmon caught by yours truly.

As I was about to start my second days fishing I heard that there were some bears up at the falls so I decided to head up there for a look instead of fishing. There was no way I was going to walk that trail by myself so I waited a few minutes until a couple came by and I joined them for the walk to the falls. As we were going through the woods I saw something brown through the trees where the trail went around a bend. I was thinking “what is that, it’s too big to be a bear”, then I realized that it was a bear standing up, scratching its back against a tree. It was absolutely massive, looked like 10 feet tall. Then it dropped down on all fours and started walking towards us. I said ‘bear”, the bear came around the corner and I nearly shat myself. On all fours it must have came as high as my shoulders, if not more. The three of us were yelling “hey bear”, etc but it just ignored us and kept coming down the trail towards us. We were retreating as it came toward us. As we retreated three other people came up the trail to us, then there were six of us retreating and yelling at the bear, but we might as well have being telling an avalanche to stop rolling down the mountainside. The three newcomers then moved off the trail into the woods, we retreated a little more and decided to also get off the trail. This was what the rangers had told us to do in such a situation but it’s hard to know exactly what kind of situation we were actually in and what the correct course of action is. It’s hard to think straight when a huge male grizzly is 40 feet from you and still coming. As it turned out it was the correct course of action, we moved a good bit off the trail, waited a few minutes then moved back to the trail and the bear was gone.

The falls were pretty cool, there were only a few bears there as only a few salmon had made it to the falls so far, but there were some salmon jumping and one funny sow whose fishing style was to fling herself on the water in a big belly flop. She often came up with a fish, she was one of the better fishing bears. I say ‘she’ cause it looked like a sow but I really haven’t a clue. I found that the sows were smaller than the males and had a tan fur where the males were darker but I know that is not a good indicator of sex at all.

So after a couple of hours I decided to head back to the lodge and met two women who were also heading back so they were nice enough to let me walk with them. We were making lots of noise, I was already nervous after meeting that huge male earlier. After a little bit, quarter mile maybe, a bear came charging out of the woods toward us. Now we did not startle it, there were no cubs nearby, the bear was a long way into the woods so it went well out of its way to go after us, so I’m not sure why we were charged. But as it was running through the trees it had to take a slightly indirect route to us and we had lots of time to watch the fucker charge us. I was basically useless; I was trying to figure out if it was a real charge or a bluff and trying to remember what we were told to do. The best that I came up with was to get my fishing rod ready to stab it in the eye if it came really close. Luckily for me though the two women with me reacted the way we were supposed to, we all bunched up together and they were yelling and waving their arms. The bear still kept charging though. It stopped a few feet away from us, looked at us for a few seconds, and then retreated a little bit down the trail and stood there watching us. We were still making lots of noise, at least my companions were, I can’t remember if I made any noise, then the bear started back up the trail towards us. We retreated slowly, rounded a bend in the trail and walked quickly back to the viewing platform at the falls. There we met a ranger and the four of us headed back down the trail without incident.

I couldn’t figure out why we were charged, we did everything we were told, make noise, be in a group, avoid cubs, don’t run, but we were still charged by a grizzly. Now I’m pretty sure it was because I was carrying a fishing rod. I hadn’t been fishing that day yet, I had just put a new fly and sinker on it so there can’t have been much of a fish smell off it. I think that the bear was watching us from the woods, stayed out of our way but then it saw that I was carrying a rod. It probably had watched and maybe chased anglers on the river like the sow had, and figured that since I was carrying a fishing rod I might have some fish on me, even if it couldn’t smell any fish. So it decided to charge in the hope that I would drop a few fish and retreat. I didn’t have any fish to drop but I did almost drop a few bricks. I’m guessing here but I’m fairly sure I’m right. I will not carry anything even vaguely resembling a fishing rod again in bear country; I’d break down the rod and disguise it in future. Same goes for coolers or stuff like that. From what I saw the bears are like people, they work on instinct as a first reaction but mostly they think things out, and are damn smart. And they are not afraid of people. I’m really glad I was not alone that time, with three of us the bear only retreated at the last second and was still very interested in us. If I’d been by myself I might have been in deep shit. God help me if I had been carrying fish.

The following morning many of the salmon that had arrived at the river mouth the day I did had made it up to the falls, and the word had gotten around the bear community. So I waited again to join some people for the walk through the woods, I met three other people and we all headed up the trail. Along the way we met another massive male grizzly and a smaller bear. This time we moved off the trail, they moved off the trail, we got back on the trail, they got back on the trail, we moved off again, they moved off again, we got back on the trail, they went back on the trail. Each time the two bears were getting closer and closer. I was pretty nervous, these bears are so big and we are obviously so helpless, but they didn’t look as if they were interested in us, and weren’t showing signs of stress, except for the small lead bear maybe. I kinda thought that they might be male and female intent on each other, or at least the male intent on the female. Then as we gave up on moving off the trail and retreated back the way we came, the two bears moved off the trail and started mating. I’d love to have gotten a good photo of that but there were too many trees between us and them, and I was not about to get any closer. I got one photo of them on the trail but the bears are out of focus. I was more interested in getting the hell away from them rather than taking their picture.

While they were shagging we moved past them and headed to the falls, almost immediately running into another bear on the trail. I’m pretty sure that this was the one that charged me the day before, at least it looked very similar.

It didn’t seem to know what to do, it didn’t want to leave the trail so kinda of zigzagged around in front of us, then with us yelling at it, it moved off the trail. When it had gone into the trees we went past it to the falls. There were lots of jokes along the way, “we don’t have to worry about the male anymore, he’ll just fall asleep when they’re done”, “watch out for that last bear, she’s pissed cause her man is banging another bear”, etc.

This time there were loads of bears at the falls fishing, loads of salmon jumping.

It was great. It was still very early in the salmon season, the bears were clearly hungry and some of the males fought over a single fish. I heard that in July when there are loads of salmon the bears just eat the eggs and fat and leave the meat.When I was there they fought over a single half eaten fish, and chased anglers for their fish.

It’s probably a lot safer to visit Katmai in July when many salmon are jumping, even though there are a lot more bears. Walking through the woods in the early hungry season, with a fishing rod, is not at all recommended.

Katmai was really great, but it has a scary side to it.

I’m kinda surprised that there aren’t more injuries there. I talked to a lot of the park rangers, there were several really nice girls there, but in fairness most of the rangers were there for the first time, it was a single summer season gig for them, they had little or no experience with brown bears and were just repeating the same stuff that I read in many books and brochures when it came to reacting to bears. There are three things I wish they’d told me on top of the usual stuff; bears can move really quick, I mean really quick, so cut your line early rather than later; early in the season they will go after you as the fishing is bad; and bears are very smart, enough of that instinct stuff, that’s only half the story. Tell me not to carry a fishing rod in the woods, it’s not all about the smell of food. They figure shit out and charge for other reasons. If you go to Katmai, do not rely solely on the park rangers, listen to what they say, but you also need to have eyes in the back of your head and don’t take the bears for granted, They’re a lot smarter and more dangerous than you might imagine.

And if you must fish there, try to catch one as nice as mine, you haven’t a hope of course.

Hmm, what to write… Maybe it’s time for another roadtrip…